The present invention concerns a cuvette package, and a method for loading an instrument intended for chemical analysis and/or handling of liquids with cuvettes from the package, said cuvettes being loaded into the instrument directly from a shipping package.
For the purpose of analyzing various liquids, automatic analyzers are used in laboratories in which the liquids to be analyzed are located in so-called reaction vessels, which at the same time serve as cuvettes of good optical quality. A row of reaction vessels, or a cuvette, may usually be composed of a plurality of reaction vessels mutually separated by a wall and which have been cast in the form of an integral row. A cuvette of this type is disclosed in the Finnish patent application No. 820372. Cuvettes like this are simple to handle, and reliable results of measurement are obtained with their aid.
The cuvettes should stay dust-free, free of scratches and intact so that the radiant flux, which in the instrument performing the analysis is caused to pass through the measuring surfaces of the reaction vessels, might yield reliable results of analysis. The cuvettes must for this reason be handled with great caution immediately after the manufacturing step and during packaging, storage, transport and use.
In the course of using such cuvettes, the need has arisen to devise a cuvette loading procedure which would guarantee that the cuvettes, when taken into use, are absolutely dust-free, free of scratches and free of fingerprints. The packaging step following the step in which the cuvettes are die-cast can be managed by methods and equipment of automation technology, whereas impacts acting on the cuvette packages proper, and human handling errors when the cuvettes are being loaded into the instrument performing the analysis, have constituted problems.